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Wolfenstein Wiki:Projects/Levels
Wikiproject Levels is an effort to improve the community-maintained pages on the countless levels of the Wolfenstein games. Purpose There exists a page on this wiki devoted to Walkthroughs. Why then are there no walkthroughs? Click virtually any link on that page under RtCW and it leads to a page about information on the level. There is a section on "Walkthrough", but invariably under each one is a Template which says the section is "To Be Written". The older games, Wolf3D and Spear of Destiny, present a link to a page for every single level, which with three exceptions overall are all empty, save for an image of a map, making the page no more useful than a link to said image. Wolfenstein (2009) lacks a Walkthroughs section entirely. This project seeks to improve the articles on levels by formulating ground rules, goals, and redefining when an explicit walkthrough is necessary. Goals Deletion At the present time, an image of every single level of Wolfenstein 3D has been taken by User:Eqagunn, and to him I am very grateful. However with each and every image, an article was created which features only its image- Here is an example. With no information, it is no more useful than that image by itself. It should then be deleted. Redlinks exist for a reason. The Wikipedia Manual of Style argues that they remind us all that the wiki is not complete, and invite us to work to change that. Beside where a redlink to a level may be found, one can put a link to the map of that level- see Episode 1 for an example. UPDATE: All the empty pages for Wolfenstein 3D have been deleted. Pending any complaint, the others may be deleted later. Organization Currently, the bastard Wolf3D level pages are named such as follows. *E3M10 *E6M09 *SOD LE1 RTD M06 They should be instead written with useful names as subpages such as: *Episode 1/Floor 1, as a subpage of Episode 1 *Spear of Destiny/Floor 21, as a subpage of Spear of Destiny *Return to Danger/Floor 9, as a subpage of Return to Danger Wolfenstein 3D episodes should be given individual pages, which the Walkthroughs article as well as the Wolfenstein 3D article will link to. These individual pages should link to subpages for individual levels. Spear of Destiny's main article should have links to subpages of that article for each of the 21 levels. The Lost Episodes should be done similarly, creating pages for both Return to Danger and Ultimate Challenge. RtCW may continue in the way it is now. Wolfenstein (2009) should operate following RtCW's model. Information Every level of every game, ideally, can be described. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has already been somewhat improved in this regard, with a page for each article providing a background. The other games need information. A usable Infobox template should be has been created for this purpose. The map of the level, if present, should be provided, and integrated into the description. A description is not a walkthrough. Information is welcomed, a walkthrough may not be necessary, especially for Wolfenstein 3D. Ideally, the descriptions should be made by someone with technical knowledge of the game (understanding, for example, in Wolfenstein 3D, the differences between difficulty levels and the mechanics of how enemies patrol). They should have played the level on highest difficulty, and should have analyzed the map of the level. Instruction If a walkthrough should be written for a level, so be it. Boss levels should be done definitely, and particularly difficult levels most likely. Excessive detail should not be used (do we really need to be told to kill every guard?). When a walkthrough Walkthroughs take a lot of effort to make on such a level, for sure. But are they really useful in all cases? Later games perhaps, but will anyone ever decide that they need step-by-step instructions through every level of Wolfenstein 3D, especially considering the run-and-gun nature of that game? The age of ASCII is gone, the age of PNG is in - perhaps an image of Episode One, Level One is better to find all the secrets than an extensive text walkthrough. This is not to say there should not be a page for each level for this Project to be a success. It is to say that information about the level, including images, may be sufficient. A walkthrough may be useful sometimes, for example, Episode 6/Floor 10 is a dastardly hard level which may require some strategic support. Or consider boss levels. But I stress more the provision of information than the provision of instruction. And when instruction is provided, it should not be terribly in-depth. Elecbullet 02:10, July 17, 2012 (UTC)